Vince had to buy a half terabyte hardrive to store the video converted from all the super 8 cannisters my family had stored away in various boxes. As a child, I remember a couple of times watching them projected on a big screen in the garage. Since then, they’ve sat unusable, tucked away and vaguely remembered.

This Easter, I plan to surprise my family as we gather in Carthage with DVD versions of several hours of precious family memories. Like many post WWII families, there are soundless flickering images of travels through America’s heartland. And then there are more recent video of things like me moonwalking to Michael Jackson records in the 1980s… 

Here are some photos I took after the rain this morning. One of the things I like about comparing them to photos from about three weeks ago is seeing things wake from their winter slumber.

The Green Mountain boxwood hedge is loaded with buds just like this same time last year. A year ago the hedge was about 2 1/2 feet tall. After the April ‘07 freeze, I had to cut the hedge down to two inch stubs. They are now over a foot tall and will hopefully double that this year.

Vince took the recycling to the recycling center. It came to 51 pounds worth of cardboard, plastic, tin and aluminum. This accumulated since we last made the trip in early December.  We calculated our recycling keeps about 60 bags of trash from ending up in the Middle Point landfill here in Rutherford County. We produce about a bag of trash per week.

Here’s a piece from the Murfreesboro Post (06-12-07) about the landfill.

In Jan. 1988, ROMAC sold its 200 acres to BFI for $10 million.

“I was stunned and realized that the political world was a pretty rough place,” Bullen said. “That event was the last that anyone expected. … People were totally stunned.”

BFI opened Jefferson Pike (Middle Point) landfill’s gates to local trash in the spring of 1988 with an expected lifetime of 20 years.

I added some photos - Hens & Chicks, Trudy, more teeth.

Mimi and Trudy watch me tweet on the Twittertubes.

The vet warned us that they’ll start loosing their baby teeth. This morning, Vince found Mimi and Trudy licking at the carpet and found this tooth! We’re not sure whose it is, but Vince thinks it’s Mimi’s.

I just set up a Flickr account and promise to put up more photos of the girls. I’m debating on upgrading the account. Anyone have advice on using Flickr? Is it worth upgrading? What I love about it is how very widget and RSS friendly they are. They even have geo-feeds for geo-mapping photos.

I spent a couple of hours Saturday cleaning up the road leading into our neighborhood while Vince was at work. I filled seven large 55 gallon trash bags full of about seven months worth of other people’s garbage. I say seven months worth because that’s about when Vince and I last cleaned it up.

We’re doers.

A lot of people stopped to thank me, which was awesome. One guy took the trash bags away. Awesome. Another guy stopped and said he had “hoped” him and his son could get out there and do it when it got warm enough. One guy thanked me and told me he had “hoped” the county would do more to keep it clean. It got me thinking a lot about hope and how little people’s hope gets things done. If you think about it, you see the most desperate expressions of hope in some of the worst neighborhoods where I guess everyone is collectively hoping that someone else will get things done and make things better. And hope never gets it done.

Besides the abundance of Marlboro cigarette packs, McDonalds and Taco Bell trash, and various beer bottles, the most common items were numerous 16 oz. plastic bottles of Mt. Dew and Chick-fil-A garbage. What kind of person tosses their garbage out of their car window in their own neighborhood?

I got my answer. Hopers.

Scattered along the road were various pieces of mail that all went back to one man who lives several houses down from us. After I was done, I drove by the address to see who it was, and I was shocked to see it was the guy who thanked me and talked to me about hoping the county government would do its job.

Between the Mt. Dew, Chick-fil-A garbage and this guy’s personal trash, I don’t think our neighborhood could handle seven more months of hope. In the end, it took a doer to clean up this mess.